A noose too far

The announcement that the government has officially ended the moratorium on the death penalty for all capital offences fills us with misgivings. President Mamnoon Hussain, on the advice of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, has directed every provincial home department to resume the hangings of all prisoners whose petitions for clemency have been exhausted and rejected. Capital punishment is to be carried out only where all legal options have been exhausted, and there is no further recourse to Article 45 of the Constitution — the presidential power to grant a reprieve. Currently, there are more than 8,000 prisoners in around 60 jails across the country, who are now in line for execution. It is reported that Punjab will hang 47 prisoners in Adiala Jail in the near future, and more will follow. Considering that Pakistan is a country where the entire justice system is flawed or corrupt from top to bottom and has been for decades, this is an unwise decision to say the very least. Many of those on death row have been there many years — 10 or more in several cases. The police are known to extract confessions under torture, hardly the most reliable basis for a conviction, and police practices generally from the gathering of forensic evidence to the simple filing of a report, are often slipshod or downright corrupt. In the interests of natural justice, the moratorium on non-terror related executions must be preserved. This is not to suggest that we necessarily endorse the execution of those who will be tried as ‘jet black’ terrorists by any future military court. To the best of our knowledge, ‘jet black’ is a term with little grounding in law and was only mentioned by the interior minister during a press conference. More so, it is a purely subjective description and should not be a part of any finding of guilt or otherwise where the life of the accused is at stake. To carry out the wholesale execution of those currently on death row is going to attract nothing but international condemnation. The government needs to rethink this decision.